Anish Kapoor - Pouch (2006)
Dear Readers,
[#a general remark#] I am very proud to present the fifth installment of The 45SIS (45 sentences, infinite sounds) featuring this time the american composer and trumpet player Nate Wooley. Nate Wooley plays the most refined and inventive free form music imaginable today. To get an impression I highly recommend to look into yesterday's Sounds of the Day completely dedicated to the works of Nate Wooley and friends. A more detailed portrait you find in the portrait section below. The 45 SIS is a questionnaire consisting of 45 sentences to be completed. This feature tries to close or at least bridge the gap between contemporary philosophical theories and contemporary sound-production by asking their most important contributors. The public reception and perception of sounds/music seems to be stuck in a weird consumer-convenience and commodity-oriented approach since ages. But music and sounds are and should be more than this: an excess of the minimal and the maximal: the invisible and the secret, maybe. Over the months and years a serious encyclopedia of debatable positions in the aforementioned field will be build up by giving leading artists and theorists a space to present themselves without further commentary by the editor.
[#the portrait#] I discovered Nate Wooley a few years ago. In a blink of an ear he became and remained my favorite trumpet player on this planet since then. The artwork by Anish Kapoor above might well be considered as emblematic for Wooley's instrumental thinking. As if Wooley has re-imagined or re-dreamed the trumpet accordingly in an oblique manner as an asubjectal interface or hovering machinal object in between interiority and exteriority (k)not(t)(h)ing them together or folding them back into each other easily but in a highly complex, often inter-active or inter-passive manner with mere machinal breath (the lungs considered here rather as artificial respiration machines for found metallic objects or pre-historial instrumental windtunnels now), hands and fingers: “Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch” (Wallace Stevens). Wooley is playing very different ciphers cutting off “his” muscular apparatus from emotive centers interrupting simultaneously the blood supply for twitching neo-romantic phantom muscles like an unheard of anarchic, âmerican Cypherborg: the "trumpet" a twisted (k)not in non-anthropic trance-personal space-time to channel the ruach (the hebrew word for "spirit" means mostly also a form of despiritualized "breath" or "wind") sometimes close to Helmut Lachenmann's ruminations in "temA"(an anagram of the german word "Atem" = "breath" linked to his seminal musique concrète instrumentale). To consider or identify this simply as “jazz” (as if “this” had been ever identical with “itself”) would be more than foolish, because it unnecessarily destroys multiple other ideas of aural stratifications and different listening perspectives and traditions (eg. read à partir de works for brass instruments and brass ensemble from Scelsi to Stockhausen, Xenakis and late Nono). Ehmm, sure, Wooley plays the trumpet in groups sometimes and sometimes alone. And ? Maybe his textures are more likely wool-ey, carefully and sometimes collectively knit pre-human, pure ARTiculation sounds (cf. his ultra-inventive work group "Syllables Music"): silences, screams, harmonies, rhythmic stutterers played into a never pre-existing, multi-dimensional time-space joycefully “lastly when all is zed and done, the penelopean patience of its last paraphe, a colophon of no fewer”. His soundworlds have also post-Cage political aspects and sometimes supportive but never illustrating narratives: his Beuys play wooley sometimes. To illustrate Wooley's immense re-invention of the trumpet choosing a slightly different angle I would like to use an anecdote. One day I did a multi hour free form listening session at home covering a lot of Wooley's works. A friend called me acccidentally with his cell phone while one of Wooley's solo pieces was playing in the background. Asking seriously and in awe "Which instrument is playing here actually ? Or how many ?" I want to close this portrait with a biographical account of this immense and important artist. I would like to quote from Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Nate Wooley was a Grant Recipient in the section “Music/Sounds” in 2016 (click here). Here one can read: “After an early education playing in big bands with his father, Nate Wooley moved to New York in 2001, where he quickly became a part of the downtown free jazz, experimental, rock, and noise scenes. Since then he has performed regularly with such iconic figures as Anthony Braxton, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Ken Vandermark, and Eliane Radigue. As a solo trumpet player, Wooley combines extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and vocalization. Wooley's 2016 Grants to Artists award supported the recording and production of [Syllables] (Pleasure Of The Text Records, 2017), a solo work consisting of four CDs, a book of essays, and a book of scores that raises questions about the necessity of success and failure in instrumental technique. With his award Wooley also commissioned composer Christian Wolff's first piece for solo trumpet, For Trumpet Player (2017). Wooley's Seven Storey Mountain series includes Seven Storey Mountain (Important Records, 2007), Seven Storey Mountain II (Important Records, 2009), and Seven Storey Mountain III and IV (Pleasure of the Text Records, 2013), all of which premiered at Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; and Seven Storey Mountain V (Pleasure of the Text Records, 2015) which premiered at Tectonics Festival New York, Abrons Arts Center, New York. Wooley's other recorded works include The Almond (Pogus Productions, 2012); Psalms From Hell, which premiered at Jazztopad Festival, Narodowe Forum Muzyki, Wrocław, Poland (2014); and I Am Their Wake, which premiered at Dampfzentrale, Bern, Switzerland (2015). In 2011, Wooley was an Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and Café Oto, and received a Recording Program Grant from the The Aaron Copland Fund for Music. In 2013 Wooley was selected to participate in the in-gallery music series Sound Horizon at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. He has also been a featured artist at MoMA PS1 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Wooley earned a B.M. and an M.M. in trumpet performance from the University of Oregon in 1997 and the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver in 1999. Nate is also the curator of the online research tool, the Database of Recorded American Music and the editor of Sound American (soundamerican.org), a quarterly online journal attempting to obliterate the perceived elitism of contemporary and experimental music".
[#discography/links/contacts#] I highly recommend to visit Nate Wooley's homepage (click here), the soundamerican site edited by Wooley (click here). Here you can find and support Nate Wooley's bandcamps (click here) and (click here). Please also visit the important Database of Recorded American Music (click here) curated by Nate Wooley. And visit of course yesterdays collection of Wooleys impressive works in my Sounds of the Day Section.
[#the presentation#] The white font shows the grid of my 45SIS-questionnaire, that will remain unchanged for each featured artist. This makes each contribution at once singular and comparable. The answers by each featured artist or scholar in this case Nate Wooley always be presented in green font.[SKG]
This is The 45SIS, No.5
brilliantly completed
by Nate Wooley
[1]“Music” and “Musician” are concepts of language and practice.
[2] The term “Sound-Art” is too open to mean much.
[3] A Sound Artist becomes a person with a title.
[4] Inventing/finding sounds are not an alternative tool for creating, just a (sometimes very welcome) limitation to the spectrum of working.
[5] An introspective nature forced me to try to aestheticize mundane sounds.
[6] The obvious tensions between classical systems of musical notation and composition, sound-sourced field-recordings, free-improvised-real-time-composition, and technology based sound processing provide the necessary articulations between adversarial ideas.
[7] Composition is architectural , writing is linear.
[8] The main theoretical aporia, existential tension or trigger that keeps me producing and/or made me produce (and/or: writing about) sounds is wanting to be immortal.
[9] The immense scope and variety of musical inventions forced into canonized music history and its basic distinction of music and non-music in the XX.Century (say) since “Arnold Schoenberg” and the counter-explosions of new underground music paradigms, non-europeans traditions and playing techniques since the 1940’s seems to be given a lot of weight, sometimes to our detriment.
[10] Time, Space and Volume ..........................................
[11] A musical instrument is a machine technology; the means of making a machine.
[12] The musical encounter of my dreams would feel redundant in reality.
[2] The term “Sound-Art” is too open to mean much.
[3] A Sound Artist becomes a person with a title.
[4] Inventing/finding sounds are not an alternative tool for creating, just a (sometimes very welcome) limitation to the spectrum of working.
[5] An introspective nature forced me to try to aestheticize mundane sounds.
[6] The obvious tensions between classical systems of musical notation and composition, sound-sourced field-recordings, free-improvised-real-time-composition, and technology based sound processing provide the necessary articulations between adversarial ideas.
[7] Composition is architectural , writing is linear.
[8] The main theoretical aporia, existential tension or trigger that keeps me producing and/or made me produce (and/or: writing about) sounds is wanting to be immortal.
[9] The immense scope and variety of musical inventions forced into canonized music history and its basic distinction of music and non-music in the XX.Century (say) since “Arnold Schoenberg” and the counter-explosions of new underground music paradigms, non-europeans traditions and playing techniques since the 1940’s seems to be given a lot of weight, sometimes to our detriment.
[10] Time, Space and Volume ..........................................
[11] A musical instrument is a machine technology; the means of making a machine.
[12] The musical encounter of my dreams would feel redundant in reality.
[13] The point zero ..................................
[14] Sounds ............. invisible sculptures ................
[15] Sounds(capes) should ..........
[16] Sounds and destruction are only consciously relatable, and then usually end up creating something boring.
[17] The human voice’s beauty disappears for me when singing begins.
[18] Listening is a choice and the way in which we listen is not dogmatic.
[19] The commodity factor of anything must be realized, not as a point of confrontation that can be eradicated, but as a currently necessary condition of the world we work in.
[20] Programs and algorithms are a sometimes interesting place to start.
[21] Names, words and titles of compositions cannot be given enough weight as the mind of the audience will put as much narrative into a numbering system as they will to a poetic description.
[22]Duplication, sampling, sound-sourcing and manipulation .......................
[23] Replay-Machines ........................
[24] Knowledge ........................ interferes ........................
[25] The materiality of sounds ........................
[26] To connect sound and psychology ........................
[27] The eye, the ear and the brain ........................
[28] Sonic processes ........................ mimesis ....................
[29] Life and Death ........................
[30] My deepest ........................ audible
[31] The distinction sound/music/noise ........................
[32] The media representation of artists leads to a constant underestimation of their innate human ability to make mistakes.
[33] Live performances ........................ interfaces ...................
[34] Sounds .................. travel from hand to hand, ear to ear, through space and time, ........................
[35] ........................ 4’33” ...................... a window................
[36] Privacy, Secrecy & Sounds ........................
[37] Singularity, originality are terms that are sometimes twisted into musical genres.
[38] The total liberation of sounds is utopian.
[39] Free form music or sound ............ into ............
[40] Cryptic minimalisms and techno ............
[41] Outsider sounds ............
[42]Electronics, electro-acoustic, Modular Synths ................... interstellar ............
[43] Sounds ............ time-space manipulations ............
[44] The severest misconceptions about me and my sounds, my music, and my theories are probably unknown to me.
[45] The sentence(s) I wanted to see published for an eternity is/are ............
Anish Kapoor - Pouch (2006)
Cordial thanks,
Nate Wooley
